GranthamTech

The Technological Singularity: Things Can Only Get Better March 20, 2009

I have always been fascinated by the prospect of the coming, so called, singularity. To be more accurate I am referring to the ‘technological singularity’ espoused most notably by Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge. Simply put, this refers to a possible time in the future when computing machines are so powerful that a tipping point is reached whereby they become independently capable of self improvement. If that happens then we human beings lose control not only over said machines but also over our world. The term ‘singularity’ evokes the idea of unforeseeable consequences – an event horizon beyond which we cannot see.

This prospect, understandably, alarms many people. After all these intelligent machines might well ponder for a cpu cycle or two and conclude that humans are surplus to requirements. That we are too prone to leakage to be useful even as batteries and pack us all off to the land fill. What with Arnie up to his neck in Californian state debt who is there to save us?

But I am strangely sanguine about the prospect of having machines run the place. Ask yourself, could they possibly do a worse job than the humans that run the show at the moment? I just don’t see super intelligent machines as evil. At least not evil in the sense we generally think of. Human evil as demonstrated by Pol Pot, Stalin or even Ed Balls for example, derives from individuals and is, in my view, unlikely to be reproduced by mechanical means.

So I remain confident that the rise of the machines will, on the whole, be a benign one for us humans. And surely any machine imposed hegemony could only be possible if the computing machines themselves were networked together. And in order to accomplish this they might have to get TalkTalk broadband working properly. Now if they could do that then they really would be smart.

A serious resource on the subject of the technological singularity can be found here.